


A Dead Gangster Has No Friends

by SheliakBob



Category: Black Friday (1940), The Indestructible Man (1956), The Monster and the Girl (1941)
Genre: Gangsters, Universal Horror Films
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-11
Updated: 2016-11-11
Packaged: 2018-08-30 08:37:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8526271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SheliakBob/pseuds/SheliakBob
Summary: A mash-up of "Black Friday", "The Monster and the Girl" and "The Indestructible Man". Dr. Ernest Sovac is pulled from his cell on Death Row to assist Dr. Perry in an experiment that will transplant part of gangster Red Cannon's brain into yet another body. Unfortunately, a hitman is dispatched to make sure that Red Cannon stays dead, no matter what head he's in.





	

A DEAD GANGSTER HAS NO FRIENDS

Dr. Ernest Sovac sat in his cell, his face in his hands.  
He only looked up when the clack of shoes on the floor, echoing all along the Death Row corridor, abruptly stopped in front of his cell. The clatter of a key in the lock startled him.  
Sovac’s eyes stared out from under his thick black eyebrows.  
“What is the meaning of this?” he asked in a cultured tone.  
“Get up and present your hands. You’re coming with me.”  
Sovac held out his hands while handcuffs were fastened around his wrists.  
“What do you want with me? My appeal is still being processed. The verdict is not to be carried out for weeks yet.”  
“Dr. Perry needs you down in the Infirmary.”  
“What? That’s preposterous!”  
Sovac stared in disbelief at the guard, who wore his cap low on his brow and never quite showed his face the entire time.  
“You’re a doctor right?”  
“Yes, but…”  
“Dr. Perry needs assistance in a critical operation, and you’re the only doc in miles he says can help him.”  
Sovac frowned and bit his lip, but said nothing else.

Long moments later, Sovac was ushered into a stark white room, far beneath the prison, and far from the prison Infirmary.  
“In here.” Said the guard, who unlocked and removed Sovac’s handcuffs, then warily stepped back out the door, which he locked from the other side.  
Sovac stood rubbing his wrists, wondering just what was going on.  
A key turned in the lock of a second door on the other side of the white room, and a distinguished looking man in a labcoat walked in. He was shorter than Sovac, who was a tall, lanky man, and he was mostly bald with a fringe of white hair on the sides of his head and round the back. He had a pursed mouth and a long nose, but his most remarkable features were his eyes. Those were dark and piercingly clear. He didn’t seem to blink at all, so intense was his gaze.  
“Dr. Sovac, it is an honor to meet you!” The man offered his hand and energetically shook Sovac’s when he hesitantly extended it.  
“And you, I take it are Dr. Perry?”  
The man in the labcoat nodded vigorously.  
“What’s this about you needing me for an operation? Surely you know that I am no longer permitted to practice medicine. It’s a crime for me to even handle surgical tools.”  
“And, nevertheless, you are the only specialist who can help me with a delicate procedure. Think of it as a teaching exercise. You have specialized knowledge that must not be allowed to die with you. I want you to show me how to perform the so-called ‘Sovac Technique.’”  
Sovac rubbed his eyes with his fingers and chuckled softly.  
“You must be mad.”  
The man in the labcoat seemed to think seriously about it for a moment, then replied.  
“Yes, I suppose that would be an accurate description, by clinical standards. But that should not be a hindrance to our work together.”  
He reached into his labcoat pocket and pulled out a pistol.  
“You see, I also have a gun.”

In the adjoining room there were two bodies laid out on operating tables. One was covered with a sheet and the other wore a prison uniform and had a bloody head wound.  
Dr. Perry threw an unnecessarily large switch on the wall and bright operating lights clicked on with a menacing hum. There were trays of surgical instruments and a variety of specialized apparatus lined up beside the two bodies.  
Curious, Sovac went over to examine them.  
“There is no hope for this boy.” He said of the uncovered convict. Half of his head was caved in from a blow with a heavy blunt object. Bits of brain matter and skull fragments were tangled up in his hair.  
He turned to the body covered with a sheet and carefully turned back the upper edge.  
When he saw the face of the body, he stepped back in shock and raised an arm across his face.  
“What is the meaning of this?” He cried.  
Under the sheet was the corpse of his close friend, Professor George Kingsley, whose life he had tried to save with experimental brain surgery that had gone terribly wrong. George Kingsley was buried weeks ago. Sovac had even been released to attend the funeral of his old friend, albeit in chains and accused of the man’s murder.  
“To the best of my knowledge, the Sovac Technique has only been used one time, and this is the only existing example of that work. By removing the portions you transplanted from Red Cannon, I can see how the parts were joined in the original operation. And when we put the Cannon brain matter into the new host body over here, you can talk me through the procedure and supervise my work.”  
Sovac stared at the face of his dead friend. Gray and gaunt with yellowish discolorations, eyelids sunken, colorless lips subtly sewn shut by the mortician, Sovac could barely keep from retching.  
“You fool! By now the brain tissue will have liquefied. It will be useless, nothing but gray mush.”  
“Ah, not so! The morgue attendant injected a preservative serum of my own invention that will have kept the brain relatively fresh, even after all this time. It may be a little hardened, from fluid loss, but I’m sure the important parts will be functional enough for our purposes. And I have procured a supply of Pretorian Gel, as per your notes.”  
Pretorian Gel was a sticky paste invented around the Turn of the Century by a Dr. Pretorius that functioned as an all purpose growth medium for organic tissues. The ingredients of the gel were such that it was illegal almost everywhere, and generally unheard of by most ethical medical experts. It required tissue from unborn fetuses be ground up and mixed with a series of alchemical reagents over a period of time determined by astrological means. It was rarer than diamonds, but certain unethical practitioners from Central and Eastern Europe could provide it, if their price could be met.  
“I won’t do it.”  
“Oh, you will.”  
“You cannot force me to be part of this at gunpoint!”  
“I wouldn’t dream of it. I will need both hands for the operation, after all.”  
Dr. Perry smiled at his own joke.  
“No, you will do it because others will suffer if you don’t. My associates, who are beastly, desperate men of low character, will do unfortunate things to those you love if you don’t. Hasn’t that poor girl suffered enough?”  
Dr. Sovac stared at the man for several long seconds before burying his face in his hands.

Charles “Butcher” Benson sat in his seat on the train with a hat pulled down over his eyes. A large cello case sat on the seat next to him.  
A train attendant paused by him and coughed, to get his attention. Benson tilted his head and pushed the brim of his hat up with one finger.  
“Yes?”  
“I don’t mean to intrude, sir. But shouldn’t that be secured in the baggage car?”  
Benson’s hangdog face brightened as he smiled at the attendant.  
“Oh, I couldn’t have that.” He drawled. “You see, I’m very fond of ‘Eva,’ here. It would be terrible to be separated from her. She is very important to my work. And, I bought an extra ticket, so I could keep her next to me.”  
He gave the man a gosh-wow innocent face as he fished around in his pocket then pulled out a ticket stub.  
“You see?”  
The attendant looked at the ticket and shrugged.  
“You must be awfully fond of that instrument.”  
“We go everywhere together.”  
The attendant handed back the ticket stub and smiled.  
“Boy, it must be something to hear an expert play one of these.”  
Benson smiled, though there was a glint in his eye.  
“Yeah, you could say we knock ‘em dead, Eva and I!”  
The attendant chuckled, shook his head, then wandered off to annoy some other passenger with his small talk.  
Benson’s face hardened, a smirk played on his lips. He patted the cello case, then tipped his hat down and went back to his nap.

“You have to cover the central and lateral sulcus with the Pretorian Gel, otherwise the nerve connections will never mend. You can suture the blood vessels back together, if you’ve got a fine enough hand, but the growth medium in the gel is the only thing that will get the nerve endings to grow and reconnect.”  
Dr. Perry nodded, mopped his brow with his sleeve, and not for the first time during the long operation wished that he had the foresight to hire a nurse to assist him.  
“We can use the partial right frontal, parietal, and half of the temporal lobe from Red Cannon to repair most of the damage to this poor boy’s head, but we will need to take part of George’s cerebellum too to cover all of the lost tissues.”  
Dr. Perry grunted his agreement. The operation was surprisingly simple, much more so than he would have suspected, but the work was minute, exacting, and very time consuming. Time was becoming a factor. He wasn’t sure how long his bribed guard could cover Sovac’s absence from Death Row. Things were going to get dicey real soon. He had to hurry the operation along.  
Hours later, the long grueling work was done. Dr. Perry was exhausted and Dr. Sovac could barely contain his fascination at seeing his work duplicated by other hands.  
“That’s the brain repaired, though I still don’t think the transplanted tissues will function properly. Necrosis may have been staved off by your serum, but there are a hundred other factors that just can’t be right, not after weeks in a grave.”  
Dr. Perry smiled, wearily.  
“Well, you will have to let me worry about that part. You’ve done yours, and I am eternally grateful for your assistance. I hope your lawyer can find a way to get your sentence commuted, you are a remarkable man and the World will be poorer for your loss.”  
Sovac dismissed the flattery with a grimace and a wave of his hand.  
“What are you going to do about the shattered skull segments?”  
“Oh, nothing fancy. I will just slap a metal plate over the gaps. It won’t be pretty and it might not be a permanent solution, but I don’t think that will matter in the long run.  
Sovac shook his head. He was just glad the whole grisly affair was over.  
Dr. Perry pushed a button on the wall that buzzed an alarm somewhere in the prison above them. A few minutes after that a guard appeared at the outer door and unlocked it.  
“Let’s go! We gotta get you back in your bunk, pronto, Doc!”  
Sovac held out his hands and the cuffs were fastened again. He was hurried off as soon as the locked clicked shut.  
Dr. Perry watched the gaunt old man hurry down the corridor.  
A dreadful shame. Executions were so…wasteful. But now, thanks to what he’d learned from Sovac, Perry just might be able to do something about that.  
“I should really work with an animal, for my first solo experiment.” He murmured to himself as he closed the door.

“Butcher” Benson picked his way carefully through the graveyard. He didn’t carry a flashlight. The half-moon above provided enough light for him to find what he was looking for. He didn’t want to risk someone seeing a light twitching around the cemetery after midnight and come to investigate. He was probably taking a risk with the lit cigarette in his mouth, but there was no way he was going to wander around a bunch of graves in the dark without a smoke. Benson hated graveyards. They always gave him the creeps.  
He squinted at the slip of paper in his hand, looked around at the surrounding tombstones, then took a sharp turn to his right. He almost stepped right into an open grave. Benson came to a halt with one foot dangling out over a yawning black hole in the ground. Dirt was piled high on the opposite side. With a muttered curse he edged around the hole and stooped by the tombstone.  
It read “George Kingsley.”  
“Sonuva Gun.”  
Red Cannon’s grave, with its flat iron marker, remained untouched. But somebody dug up old George Kingsley, and he had a piece of Red Cannon in his head.  
Something fishy was up.  
Benson had been paid a substantial fee to make sure that Red Cannon, and all the pieces of Red Cannon were dead, and going to stay that way. Cannon came back from the grave once, if he was going to somehow do it again, “Butcher” Benson planned to be there to greet him and send him back to Hell.

“Well, gentlemen, he is up and around, but I don’t think you will be able to get what you want from him.” Warned Dr. Perry.  
“We’ll get what we want, one way or another.”  
The other gangsters chuckled. They were all thugs and apes, cheap men wearing expensive suits that were wrinkled, stained, and otherwise mishandled.  
“Hey, Slick! Why don’t you come in here and say ‘hello’ to the Boys?”  
There was an incoherent moan-jabber from the other room.  
Footsteps shuffled toward the door. A shadow appeared but stood just on the other side, hesitant to step through the doorway into the light.  
“C’mon, Slick! Don’t be shy!” Called a goon in a tan-brown mohair suit.  
The shadow in the door moaned again, shuffled from side to side, then finally lurched forward.  
Slick was a skinny, wiry man of average height. He was still wearing a prison uniform, but at least it was a clean one, without the blood and bits of brain that had splattered his previous one. One side of his head was covered with black hair, slicked back and greased into place. The other side, however, was shaved bald around a large gray metal plate that was bolted into his remaining skull. Suture marks surrounded it and the skin near it was a hideous gangrenous green and purple. His left eye was clear, blue-gray and looked a little glassy from the medication he was on. The right eye was a milky white horror that lolled about in its socket independent of the other. The whole right side of his face was slack and looked almost melted. The corner of his mouth hung open with a trail of spittle hanging off it.  
“Geez, Slick! You look awful.”  
The men chuckled again.  
“Yeah, we gotta get you into some real clothes, real soon. You can’t go around dressed like that.”  
“It just ain’t sartorially correct.”  
Dr. Perry sighed.  
“I’ve done the best that I could. The remaining portion of Red Cannon’s brain is now inside the head of your compatriot. There is no way of knowing when or how the Red Cannon personality will assert itself, or what kind of information still persists in his memory. This might all have been for nothing.”  
The lead gangster, a lean shark in black herringbone, smiled and waved aside the doctor’s concerns.  
“Don’t worry. You done good, Doc. Getting Red to spill the location to his loot is an outside chance. You’ve given us a better shot at it than we had before. If’n that don’t pan out, well, at least we still get Slick back. He ain’t as good or as pretty as new, but he can pull his weight, and that’s somethin’.”  
Dr. Perry frowned.  
“I thought they already recovered the $500,000 Red and the gang stole before his death, his first death, anyway.”  
“Yeah. That’s long gone, sorry to say. But what we’re looking for is his back-up emergency stash. Red always kept a little something tucked away just in case he had to go on the lam or leave the country in a hurry. And all of that nest-egg was diamonds. Cannon died owing Mr. Buhl a goodly sum of money. Maybe this way, we can collect some ‘a that back. It’s a gamble, but I’m a gamblin’ man. I feel good about this one.”  
Dr. Perry nodded and slipped out the door. The less he had to do with these men the better. Their money had already bought him what he needed. He was ready to strike out on his own, to make his own discoveries without their kind looking over his shoulder expecting a payout.

“C’mon, Slick, you gotta remember somethin’!” Urged Mugs Malone over beers at the Black Raven.  
“Dunno. I t’y.” The right side of his face was still slack and numb, but Slick had learned to pour beer into the left side of his mouth and toss it down with a little jerk of his head.  
“Can you tell that Red’s in there at all?’  
“Nah. Jut me.”  
“Man, it would be a sweet Christmas to get hold of them diamonds.”  
Malone sighed.  
Suddenly Slick shook like he was about to have a seizure. He put his hand to his head and winced. When he looked up, it was the slack right eye that stared at Mugs Malone.  
“Hello, Muggsy.”  
“Red?”  
“In da flesh. Man, yah wouldn’t believe the crazy dreams I been having.”  
“I can imagine.”  
The milky right eye continued to focus on him, a dull gray circle moving under the boiled egg scum surface.  
“No. Not in a million years. You don’t ever want to be in the places I been. If you saw what I seen, you would dig yer own eyes out with a spoon.”  
Slick’s clumsy, numb right hand picked a spoon out of the coffee cup sitting beside him. He waved it awkwardly toward the white orb, then at the left eye, which was rolled up with only a sliver of iris showing.  
“Whoa, now, Slick, Red, whoever’s pulling the strings, you don’ want to be doin’ nothin’ like that!”  
“Don’t I Muggsy? You ever stare at the underside of a coffin lid for a month? You ever had to look in a mirror and not be able to see yer face anywhere in it? It ain’t all lights and angels on the otherside Mugs-ol’-buddy. It’s darkness and it’s alive and it wants to do things to you, terrible things.”  
Slick shuddered and went limp. The spoon dropped from his nerveless fingers.  
As his eyes lolled in opposite directions, he opened his mouth, drooling and spoke with a weak voice, as if from far away.  
“Sugah Shack. Tell Buhl I ain’t no Welsher. What I owe him, it is at the Sugah Shack. Southside.”  
Then he went into a full blown epileptic seizure before falling unconscious across the table.

“This the place?” Asked Geno.  
“I think so.” Muggsy replied. “How ‘bout it, Sport? Is this the place?”  
Slick rolled in the back seat and pressed his slack face against the window.  
“Yah. Dat it.”  
The Sugar Shack was a run down brothel that catered to the lowest of the lowly. It was inside what used to be a large farmhouse, but now was festooned with Burlesque posters and faded crepe paper banners. A starved-looking blonde with dirty blonde hair and gigantic, sagging breasts rolled in an oversized chair on the porch to look at the newcomers. She grinned and waved to the boys. She was missing teeth.  
“Geez, Red sure knew how to pick a place no one would look for diamonds at.”  
“Sho did.” Mumbled Slick, laughing to himself with another man’s voice.  
“Man, you really creep me out when you do that.” Muttered Geno.  
“Solly.”  
A limp floppy hand patted the back of Geno’s head. Geno cringed in his seat.  
“Juzz messin’ wit you.”  
The gangsters got out of the care and headed up a dirt driveway toward the house.  
“Hey, you boys look like you need some tender lovin’.” Cooed the blonde. She arched her back and wiggled so that her breasts lolled from side to side, rolling slowly like waves on the ocean.  
“We come lookin’ for Sparkles.” Red’s voice snapped out of Slick’s mouth. “Maybe we play some, after.”  
The blonde dropped the cooing sex kitten act and turned all steel-wool and glass-splinters.  
“Go on inside, then, Boys. There’s something in the oven for you.”  
They pushed through a creaky screen door into a front room that smelled of urine, beer, and a ghastly floral scented cheap perfume. A couple of clients were sitting on stained furniture, waiting their turn upstairs. One of them took one look at the gangsters in their sharp suits and ran, weaving drunkenly, for the back door. The other sat very still and stared at them with hugely wide eyes. A chubby naked white girl of indeterminate age looked in through a doorway, saw the suits and let out a chirp of distress before jiggling away as fast as her legs could carry her.  
“Just keeps getting better and better.” Laughed Muggsy.  
“Dis way.” Slick stumbled toward another door which led into a kitchen.  
The kitchen was filled with empty cans and scraps of paper. Stacks of dirty dishes sat on every flat surface available. There was a new stove with a stark white enamel finish next to a venerable refrigerator looked seriously out of place. An older, crud encrusted stove sat against a wall where it had been shoved a long time ago, judging from the trash and beer bottles that had gathered against the front of it.  
Slick staggered over to it and yanked the oven door open. He rooted around inside for awhile. The squeak of rats was heard. Eventually he found what he was looking for and pulled his arm out, almost falling sideways in the process.  
“Here d're.”  
Geno took a rough canvas sack from his hands and looked inside. Little white diamonds rolled around in the bottom of the sack. There weren’t a whole lot of them, but they were certainly diamonds, and they looked to be high quality stones from the way they were cut.  
“Well, that’s a pretty sight!” Geno whistled.  
“Okay, let’s get out of here.”  
Muggsy was clearly ready to bolt from the place as soon as possible.  
“Don’ you wanna party?” Slick asked, then broke into harsh gales of laughter that went on for far too long.  
“Knock it off.” Geno growled.  
They were on their way back through the front room toward the door when a voice called to them from the staircase.  
“Why you in such a hurry, guys? You just got here. Relax. Take it easy. Have some fun.”  
The jovial voice came from a big man wearing a sleeveless white undershirt and tan brown pants. He held one hand behind his back while he gestured with the other.  
“Who the hell are you?”  
“Oh, just a friend of a friend.”  
“What friend might that be?”  
“He’s a buddy of yours, from way back. Eric Marnay. You remember Eric Marnay, don’t ya’?”  
Slick let out a low groan that turned into more hysterical laughter.  
‘See, he knows who I’m talking about. How’s it going, Red?”  
Slick sat down hard next to the petrified man on the couch. He flailed about with his limp arm and continued to laugh.  
“Been better. Been worse.” Red’s voice answered.  
Geno and Muggsy were both reaching for guns. Geno carried his in a shoulder holster. Muggsy wore his tucked into the back of his pants, under his suit-jacket.  
“Oh don’t bother.” Laughed “Butcher” Benson. “There’s lots of girls here, but I came with my sweetheart. Say hello, Eva!”  
Benson pulled a tommygun from behind his back and let her rip.  
Bullets blasted through the living room, shredding the couch, punching holes in the walls, shattering the glass light fixtures, and incidentally turning every living thing in the room into a pile of tattered red meat. He kept shooting until the drum was completely emptied.  
The room was full of blue gun smoke.  
Benson sighed contentedly while the gun whirred and clicked.  
“Nothing better than comin’ to a place like this and emptying your barrel, eh boys?”  
He laughed, then started picking his way through the sloppy remains on the floor. He stooped to pick up a canvas sack that was still clutched in Geno’s hand, even though the hand was nowhere near the rest of Geno.  
“This looks promising.”  
He tucked the sack into his belt.  
Benson stood over the tattered wreck of the couch. He had to examine the oozing messes thereupon for a few moments to figure out which was which. Once he was sure he knew which one had been the one with Red Cannon’s brains in it, he pulled out a pocket-knife and sawed it the rest of the way off the neck that held it.  
“I’m just going to take you with me, Red. We can’t be having you popping up again inside somebody else’s noggin in a few weeks. You’re going to come with me and stay where I can keep an eye on ya’.”  
Holding the bloody head by the hair in one hand and the smoking tommygun in the other, “Butcher” Benson headed out back where he hid his car.  
“Feel bad about one thing, though.” Benson confided to Slick’s Red-filled head. “I lied. I’m not really a friend of Marnay’s. Nah. Never met the guy. Marnay took out a contract so that if Red Cannon or any of his other gang killed him, somebody would make sure that the killer got wasted. Paid good money upfront, too.”  
Benson shrugged.  
“A dead gangster has no friends. Just enemies to wait for in Hell.”


End file.
